Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites • Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Ars Longa Vita Brevis Ophelia and the Pre-Raphaelites Ophelia is a captivating character, one that inspired many of the Pre-Raphaelites and other Victorian artists. For those unfamiliar with Ophelia, she is Hamlet’s innocent young love interest in one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays ( Hamlet ). Hamlet loved Ophelia – but after his meeting with the ghost of his father (Act I) he feels compelled to set their love aside in order to focus on avenging his father’s murder. Poor Ophelia is unaware of Hamlet’s motives or his inner turmoil. He chooses not to express his sense of betrayal (and who can blame him for feeling betrayed when his uncle murdered his father and then married his mother, Queen Gertrude ). Ophelia is perplexed and hurt by Hamlet’s madness — and when Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father ( Polonius ) in an irrational fit, Ophelia is herself driven to insanity. Picking flowers and singing songs, Ophelia accidentally drowns.

Perhaps the most famous painting of Ophelia is by John Everett Millais , using Elizabeth Sidda l as a model. Siddal took great pains to pose as Ophelia: “Miss Siddal had a trying experience whilst acting as a model for Ophelia. In order that the artist might get the proper set of the garments in water and the right atmosphere and aqueous effects, she had to lie in a large bath filled with water, which was kept at an even temperature by lamps placed beneath. One day, just as the picture was nearly finished, the lamps went out unnoticed by the artist, who was so intensely absorbed in his work that he thought of nothing else, and the poor lady was kept floating in the cold water till she was quite benumbed. She herself never complained of this, but the result was that she contracted a severe cold, and her father wrote to Millais, threatening with an action of 50 lbs. for his carelessness. Eventually the matter was satisfactorily compromised. Millais paid the doctor’s bill, and Miss Siddal, quickly recovering, was none the worse for her cold bath.” — The son of the artist, John Guille Millais , describing the incident.

(For more on the painting by Millais, see the Ophelia page on my site LizzieSiddal.com . On this site, see Ophelia’s Flowers . Ophelia by Millais Dante Gabriel Rossetti chose to portray Ophelia in a different way, drawing inspiration from the passages I’ve transcribed below: Women In Hamlet The Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia Elaine Showalter points out a particular interest among the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the late 19th Century. These Pre-Raphaelite images were part of a new and intricate traffic between images of woman and madness in the late nineteenth-century literature, psychiatry, drama, and art. First of all, superintendents of Victorian lunatic asylums were also enthusiasts of Shakespeare, who turned to his dramas for models of mental aberration that could be applied to their clinical practice. The case study of Ophelia was one that seemed particularly useful as an account of hysteria or mental breakdown in adolescence, a period of sexual instability which the Victorians regarded as risky for women's mental health.

- Elaine Showalter,"Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism" in Susanne L.Wofford (ed.), Hamlet, Bedford Books, Boston, 1994. p. 229f. Probably the most important of the mid-nineteenth century paintings of Ophelia was John Everett Millais' painting of 1851-2. As we shall see, the pose of his drowning Ophelia set the standard for many of the representations that were to follow. John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1852 An interesting story about the creation of this painting accompanied its first showing at the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1852, and added to the publicity it attracted. Millais began work on the painting in the summer of 1851, painting the river and the background by the River Ewell near Kingston-Upon-Thames. The outdoor location caused him trouble. 'I sit tailor-fashion', he wrote, 'under an umbrella throwing a shadow scarcely larger than a halfpenny for eleven hours, with a child's mug within reach to satisfy my thirst from the running stream beside me ...

am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water, and becoming intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when the lady sank to muddy death. His model for Ophelia, Elizabeth Siddal also suffered fleshly mortifications when she sat for the picture. The painting was completed in London during the following winter and Miss Siddal had to lie in a bath of water, heated by oil lamps from below. The cold she caught as a result brought a complaint against the artist from Miss Siddal's father, with the threat for an action of £50 damages. The action was settled and Miss Siddal's portrait considered to be the best likeness ever painted of her. - Andrea Rose, The Pre-Raphaelites, Phaidon, London, 1977, p.54. Notice the similarity of position chosen for the drowned Ophelia in the bronze relief created by Antoine Auguste Préault. Antoine Auguste Préault, Ophélie, 1876 A similar improbable position appears in Gordon Browne's illustration for the Henry Irving edition of the Works of William Shakespeare in 1890.

Laurence Olivier also seems to have had the Millais image in mind for his 1948 film production. Once again, we find Ophelia on her back, facing upward as if resting in her watery repose. Even though the subject of Paul Delaroche's 1855 painting The Young Martyr was not Ophelia, echoes of Millais are still apparent in the image and its composition. Arthur Hughes' Ophelia appeared at the same time as Millais' but with far less fanfare. Arthur Hughes, Ophelia, 1852 Perhaps because of the common subject matter, Millais himself was attracted to the painting. His work was most closely influenced by Millais, although curiously (having known Hunt, Rossetti and Brown for some time) he did not meet Millais until 1852, when they both had paintings entitled Ophelia in the Royal Academy exhibition. Hughes' work was poorly placed, hung in the octagon room, commonly known by attests as 'the condemned cell.' Millais, however, spotted the picture and admired it.

Hughes met him in front of the picture and later recalled that Millais 'had just been up a ladder looking at my picture, and that it gave him more pleasure than any picture there, but adding very truly that I had not painted the right kind of stream.' In fact the stream and strewn flowers are the most convincingly Pre-Raphaelite portions of the work - tightly painted and clear. The rest is moody, its misty greens and dusty reds suggestive, rather than illustrative, of the sadness of Ophelia.  Andrea Rose, The Pre-Raphaelites, Phaidon, London, 1977. p.58. Famous paintings of Ophelia by Millais, Waterhouse and other artists Famous paintings of Ophelia by Millais, Waterhouse and other artists Updated on August 2, 2012 Ophelia by John Everett Millais, 1851-52 Image courtesy of Wiki Commons Millais's Pre-Raphaelite Ophelia - Lizzie Siddall modelled in a bathtub The Pre-Raphaelite artists of Victorian England painted many Shakespearian characters, but Ophelia was a particular favourite.

The sad death by drowning of Hamlet's sweetheart has captured the imagination of numerous artists, but John Everett Millais' well-known painting of a pale, red-haired Ophelia floating in still, dark water, surrounded by overhanging greenery, and a drifting posy of flowers, is surely the most famous of these images. John Millais was a founder member of a group of Victorian artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was dedicated to producing a fresh and naturalistic realism in his art, and had a very good eye for detail. Millais planned his painting of Ophelia with meticulous care, beginning with the background, which he painted directly from a section of the Hogsmill River in Ewell, Surrey. The laborious task of faithfully recording every bud, every leaf, and every blade of grass took Millais a solid five months of work. He sat painting on the riverbank for up to eleven hours a day, six days a week, and as the summer of 1851 wore on into autumn, and the weather began to turn against him, he had a little hut erected to shelter him from the rain and wind while he worked.

The second stage of Ophelia was completed in Millais' studio at 7 Gower Street in London. Nineteen year old Elizabeth Siddal agreed to model for the painting, and she was made to lie fully clothed in a full bathtub in the studio. By now it was winter, and Millais was obliged to place oil lamps under the tub to warm the water. Unfortunately, however, he soon became so engrossed in his work that he failed to notice when they went out. As a result, Siddal caught a severe cold, and her angry father sent Millais a letter demanding £50 for medical expenses, though eventually a lower sum was agreed. The flowers shown floating on the river correspond with Shakespeare's description of Ophelia's garland. T"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts," said Ophelia to her brother Laertes. "There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy.

I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died." The flowers illustrated also reflect the Victorian interest in the "language of flowers", which suggests that each bloom has a symbolic meaning. Millais has included red poppies in his painting, although these are not mentioned in Shakespeare's description, and the poppy represents sleep and death. Ironically, the model, Lizzie Siddal later died tragically of a laudanum overdose. Laudanum is derived from the opium poppy. Detail from Ophelia by John Everett Millais Image courtesy of Wiki Commons Ophelia by John William Waterhouse, 1894 Oil on canvas. Image courtesy of Wiki Commons Ophelia by John William Waterhouse John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) painted many large canvases in a Pre-Raphaelite style. He was particularly fond of subjects from literature, especially beautiful, tragic heroines. The character of Ophelia greatly appealed to him, and he was to paint her four times. A fifth planned painting was never completed due to ill-health.

In Shakespeare's play, 'Hamlet', Ophelia is the daughter of Polonius, and sister to Laertes. She has been Hamlet's sweetheart, but he rejects her love, and subsequently kills her father. These actions profoundly affect Ophelia and unbalance her mind. Her mad scene (act IV, scene 5) is one of the best known in Western literature. In Waterhouse's painting shown above, Ophelia is decorating her hair with a garland, and there are more flowers and herbs in her lap. She is shown sitting on a bent over willow on the banks of a brook, and we know that this is where she will meet her fate. Ophelia by Arthur Hughes, 1851-53 Oil on panel. Image courtesy of Wiki Commons Ophelia by Arthur Hughes Arthur Hughes (1832-1915) completed his version of Ophelia in 1853 when he was only 21 years old. Hughes' Ophelia is a fragile, pale creature seated on the bent over trunk of a willow, contemplating the waters at her feet.

Her hair is garlanded, and she is holding an armful of greenery. Hughes has painted his heroine with such delicacy. Her skin is almost luminous, and her expression is unbearably sad. The painting has been completed on panel, and the golden arch that frames it, is inscribed with words from Shakespeare's play, 'Hamlet', Act 4 Scene 7; There is a willow grows aslant a brook That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream There with fantastic garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples 10 best pre-Raphaelite paintings | Agenda | Art and design | The Guardian Close 1 John Everett Millais: Isabella (1848-49) There were seven members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) founded in 1848, all young artists or writers of a romantic and rebellious nature, dissatisfied with what was taught and exhibited at the Royal Academy.

They took their inspiration and what the critic John Ruskin called their "unfortunate and somewhat ludicrous" name, from the idea that art before the time of Raphael – early Renaissance painting – was more direct and honest than what was later promoted in academies and textbooks. Isabella was one of the group's first major paintings. It was shown at the RA in 1849 and carries the initials PRB, carved on the chair leg. Millais combined extreme profiles and flattened perspective with sharp detail and vibrant colour. The subject the doomed lovers Lorenzo and Isabella, from Keats's 1818 poem Isabella, or The Pot of Basil. 2 Arthur Hughes: The Long Engagement (1859) Inspired by the pre-Raphaelites while a student at the Royal Academy, Hughes maintained their style and themes long after the PRB had disbanded. He specialised in literary and romantic subjects with figures often in landscape settings, using a distinctive palette including purple from newly available pigments. This memorable two-figure composition – not forgetting the faithful dog – is a poignant commentary on a contemporary social issue: the clergyman is too poorly paid to marry, and during their long engagement ivy has grown over the name of his beloved, cut into the tree.

3 Henry Wallis: Chatterton (1855-56) Striking images of single or double figures, frozen at a moment of tension or crisis, or even death, were a mainstay of pre-Raphaelite art. Wallis's re-creation of the suicide by poison of Thomas Chatterton, the gifted young 18th-century poet, has become an icon of the neglected genius starving in his attic. By 1856, when this was shown at the Royal Academy, pre-Raphaelitism had all but won its battle, and the young Wallis "found himself famous". There are typical pre-Raphaelite personal complications behind the painting: the model for Chatterton was the poet and novelist George Meredith, whose wife Mary Ellen ran off with the painter two years later. 4 Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter's Shop) (1849-50) This created a furore when first shown at the Royal Academy. Many were outraged by its realistic treatment of the life of Christ.

So strong was the pre-Raphaelite principle of truth to nature that Millais did part of his work in an actual carpenter's shop: for the figure of Joseph the head of the artist's father was used in conjunction with the carefully observed artisan's body. Charles Dickens, a poor judge of art, was among many caustic critics, but Queen Victoria had it brought from the Academy for a private viewing. 5 Millais: Ophelia (1851-52) Shakespeare provided a rich source for pre-Raphaelite paintings, but rarely for simple theatrical effect. Millais uses the drowning of Ophelia in Hamlet for a bravura demonstration of close nature study, many of the plants also carrying symbolic significance, including forget-me-nots and the poppy for death. The setting is the Hogsmill River at Ewell in Surrey, and the model, the red-headed Elizabeth Siddal, famously posed in a bath of water heated by lamps, catching a terrible cold when they went out.

6 Edward Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris (1873-75) Burne-Jones is the best known among the second generation of painters who were connected with the PRB but who could be better called late romantic or symbolist (post-pre-Raphaelite would be accurate, but sounds ridiculous). A fellow student at Oxford University with William Morris, he owed much to early encouragement from Rossetti and Ruskin, but gradually developed his own style, absorbing Old Master and classical motifs. A sensuous languor and a synaesthesia of art, sex and music pervade Laus Veneris (The Song of Venus), which loosely evokes the German legend of Tannhäuser, filtered through the poetry of Algernon Swinburne (a close friend) as well as the Wagner opera of 1861. 7 William Holman Hunt: The Light of the World (1851-53) The most earnestly religious member of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood PRB, Holman Hunt spent two years in the Holy Land from 1854, working on The Scapegoat and The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.

Before he left, he completed this picture and its secular counterpart, The Awakening Conscience. Each combines moral truth with painterly realism, in a way that delighted Ruskin, who wrote letters of praise to the Times. Hunt told a friend that he had painted it "with what I thought to be divine command, and not simply as a good subject". A larger and later version (painted in 1900) hangs in St Paul's Cathedral 8 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The Blue Bower (1865) Of Italian parentage but born in London, Rossetti was the flamboyant driving force behind the PRB, and also a celebrated poet. His early work was mostly in watercolour, concentrating on medieval romantic themes such as the Arthurian legend, and he began painting in oils seriously only in the 1860s. Elizabeth Siddal had been his model, mistress and wife, but after her suicide in 1862 Rossetti turned to the earthier Sarah Cox, better known as Fanny Cornforth. Lacking any specific subject, The Blue Bower is a typical celebration of controlled female sensuality, often matched in his poetry.

Passion flowers add to the atmosphere and the symbolism, together with exotic details such as the Indian jewel and Japanese musical instrument. 9 Ford Madox Brown: The Last of England (1852-55) This famous emigration scene was inspired by the departure for Australia in 1852 of the PRB sculptor Thomas Woolner. A little older than the others, Brown was not a member of the PRB but was intimately associated with them. By eliminating the corners and emphasising the enclosing contours, he provides an almost telescopic focus on the apprehensive couple, whose baby is wrapped in the mother's shawl. The figures were based on Brown and his wife, Emma, along with their children Katty and Oliver. A long-suffering perfectionist, it took Brown three years to complete the picture. 10 Ford Madox Brown: An English Autumn Afternoon, Hampstead (1852-55) Even with the foreground figures, this is essentially a piece of pure landscape, representing a view over Hampstead Heath towards Highgate.

Other PRB painters also succeeded in making an apparently uninspiring view compelling by a devotion to the most precise detail, rather than following the tradition of Constable by re-arranging the subject for pictorial effect. This baffled Ruskin, who liked some meaning in a picture and asked Brown why he had painted "such a very ugly subject". The artist replied, "Because it lay out of a back window." Ten things you never knew about Ophelia - Telegraph Art Ten things you never knew about Ophelia As John Everett Millais' Ophelia returns to Tate Britain, Benjamin Secher reveals the roles played by a tin bath and a deformed vole in the birth of Britain’s favourite painting Ophelia (1851-2) by John Everett Millais Photo: © Tate Follow Ophelia, John Everett Millais’s bewitching depiction of Hamlet’s sweetheart sinking to a watery death, is one of the most familiar images in art . It has adorned the walls of the Tate for most of the 117 years since the gallery opened, attracting millions of viewers to admire its forensic detail – and buy the postcard, which remains a runaway bestseller in the gallery shop.

As it goes back on display at Tate Britain following an international tour, here’s an alternative guide to some of the lesser known facts about Britain's favourite painting. 1 Millais suffered for his art After identifying a suitably bucolic setting for his picture, Millais perched at his easel on the banks of the Hogsmill River in Surrey for up to 11 hours a day, six days a week throughout a five-month period in 1851. He was determined to capture with unprecedented accuracy the natural scene before his eyes – but such devotion to his art came at a cost. “The flies of Surrey are more muscular, and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh,” he grumbled in a letter to a friend. “I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay… and am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water.

Certainly the painting of a picture under such circumstances would be greater punishment to a murderer than hanging.” 2 Desperate times called for desperate measures When November 1851 brought bitter winds and snow to the Surrey countryside, Millais decided he needed some kind of shelter and oversaw the building of a peculiar hut “made of four hurdles, like a sentry-box, covered outside with straw”. Sitting in it, with his paints (probably stored in pig bladder cases – collapsible tubes had only recently been invented and were still scarce) and with stray pieces of straw whistling around his ears, he felt, he said, like Robinson Crusoe. His friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist, William Holman Hunt, who was simultaneously painting his own great work The Hireling Shepherd a little along the river, was so taken with Millais’s hut that he had an identical structure built for himself. Related Articles 30 Jun 2010 3 An animal vanished during the making of this picture At an early stage, Millais included a water vole (which an assistant had fished out of the Hogsmill) in his composition, gently paddling alongside the stricken Ophelia.

In December 1851, Millais showed the uncompleted painting to relatives of Hunt. “Hunt’s uncle and aunt came, both of whom understood most gratifyingly every object except my water rat,” he notes in a diary entry of the time. “The male relation, when invited to guess at it, eagerly pronounced it to be a hare. Perceiving by our smiles that he had made a mistake, a rabbit was next hazarded. After which I have a faint recollection of a dog or a cat being mentioned”. By the time the painting was unveiled at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1852, the rogue rodent had vanished, although a rough sketch of it can still be found, tucked away in an upper corner of the canvas now concealed by the frame. 4 Ophelia caught a cold Determined to depict Shakespeare’s waterlogged maiden with utmost accuracy, but recognising that the chances of persuading someone to pose in the freezing Hogsmill were distinctly slim, Millais came up with the wheeze of getting his model – the 19-year-old Elizabeth Siddall, future wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – to lie, fully clothed, in a full bathtub.

Oil lamps were placed underneath the tub to keep the water warm, but when they went out the artist was too engrossed in his work to notice. Lying deathly still in chilly water for hours on end left Siddall with a stinking cold, and Millais with a £50 doctor’s bill. 5 Not everybody fell for Ophelia’s charms When the painting made its public debut at the Royal Academy in London in 1852, the critics were far from unanimous in their praise. The Times declared that “there must be something strangely perverse in the imagination which sources Ophelia in a weedy ditch, and robs the drowning struggle of that love-lorn maiden of all pathos and beauty”. Another newspaper objected that “Mr Millais’s Ophelia in her pool… makes us think of a dairymaid in a frolic." And even John Ruskin, a great supporter of Millais, was not altogether kind.

Although he found the technique of the painting to be “exquisite”, he expressed grave doubts about Millais’s decision to set it in a Surrey landscape: “Why the mischief should you not paint pure nature,” he asked, “and not that rascally wirefenced garden-rolled-nursery-maid’s paradise?” 6 In the 20th century, Salvador Dalí emerged as a surprise champion of the picture “How could Salvador Dalí fail to be dazzled by the flagrant surrealism of English Pre-Raphaelitism,” wrote the great surrealist in an article published in a 1936 journal, alongside a reproduction of Ophelia. “The Pre-Raphaelite painters bring us radiant women who are, at the same time, the most desirable and most frightening that exist.” 7 Ophelia is big in Japan The painting has enjoyed something of a cult following in the Far East since it was immortalised as “a thing of considerable beauty” in a novel by the renowned Japanese novelist Natsume Soseki in 1906.

When it travelled to Tokyo in 2008 as part of a Millais exhibition, the Japanese decided not to use the image of Ophelia on promotional posters for fear that its romantic power would inspire young women to take their own lives. 8 Millais sold the painting for 300 guineas Ophelia was bought from the artist on Dec 10, 1851 by art dealer Mr Henry Farrer for 300 guineas. He sold it on to a keen Pre-Raphaelite collector called Mr BG Windus, who then sold it in 1862 for 748 guineas. Millais’s work has continued to increase in value at a phenomenal pace ever since. Last year, his 1868 painting Sisters sold at auction for a record £2.3 million. Experts estimate that the current value of Ophelia is at least £30 million. 9 The artist didn’t always seem destined for greatness Millais’s educational career got off to an inauspicious start when, at the age of four, he was expelled from nursery, after just three days, for biting his teacher’s hand.

Seven years later he redeemed himself – and put his career back on track – by becoming the youngest pupil ever admitted to the Royal Academy school, where he earned the nickname “the child”. In 1885, he became the first artist to become a baronet and by the following year he was exploiting the commercial aspect of his work to earn the modern equivalent of nearly £2 million a year. 10 The building where Ophelia was painted still stands Millais’s studio was on the second floor at 7 Gower Street in London, just around the corner from the British Museum. A blue plaque today identifies the building as the place where “The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848”. But other than that, little evidence remains of its key role in the creation of the nation’s favourite picture. The building is now occupied by an oil and gas exploration company. The famous bathtub has been replaced by a photocopier. Ophelia (1851-52) by John Everett Millais is on permanent display at Tate Britain, London SW1.

Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk 'Ophelia', Sir John Everett Millais, Bt, 1851–2 | Tate Display caption Summary The scene depicted is from Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, in which Ophelia, driven out of her mind when her father is murdered by her lover Hamlet, drowns herself in a stream: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes, As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element; but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. Shakespeare was a favourite source for Victorian painters, and the tragic-romantic figure of Ophelia from Hamlet was an especially popular subject, featuring regularly in Royal Academy exhibitions.

Arthur Hughes exhibited his version of her death scene in the same year as this picture was shown (Manchester City Art Gallery). Millais began the background in July 1851, at Ewell, Surrey. In accordance with the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he painted with close observation of nature. Millais quickly found, however, that such intense study was not without problems, and was moved to remark in a letter to Mrs Thomas Combe, My martyrdom is more trying than any I have hitherto experienced. The flies of Surrey are more muscular, and have a still greater propensity for probing human flesh ... I am threatened with a notice to appear before a magistrate for trespassing in a field and destroying the hay ... am also in danger of being blown by the wind into the water, and becoming intimate with the feelings of Ophelia when that Lady sank to muddy death, together with the (less likely) total disappearance, through the voracity of the flies ... Certainly the painting of a picture under such circumstances would be a greater punishment to a murderer than hanging. (J.G. Millais I, pp.119-20) The figure of Ophelia was added afterwards.

The model, Elizabeth Siddal, a favourite of the Pre-Raphaelites who later married Rossetti, was required to pose over a four month period in a bath full of water kept warm by lamps underneath. The lamps went out on one occasion, causing her to catch a severe cold. Her father threatened the artist with legal action until he agreed to pay the doctor's bills. The plants, most of which have symbolic significance, were depicted with painstaking botanical detail. The roses near Ophelia's cheek and dress, and the field rose on the bank, may allude to her brother Laertes calling her 'rose of May'. The willow, nettle and daisy are associated with forsaken love, pain, and innocence. Pansies refer to love in vain. Violets, which Ophelia wears in a chain around her neck, stand for faithfulness, chastity or death of the young, any of which meanings could apply here. The poppy signifies death. Forget-me-nots float in the water.

Millais wrote to Thomas Combe in March 1852: 'Today I have purchased a really splendid lady's ancient dress - all flowered over in silver embroidery - and I am going to paint it for "Ophelia". You may imagine it is something rather good when I tell you it cost me, old and dirty as it is, four pounds' (J.G. Millais I, p.162). Ophelia was part of the original Henry Tate gift to the Tate Gallery. Further reading John Guille Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899, I, pp.116-20, 123, 129-131, 144-7, 151, 162-3 Leslie Parris (ed.), The Pre-Raphaelites, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1984, reprinted 1994, pp.96-8, reproduced in colour Terry Riggs Read more Display caption Millais’s painting represents the drowning Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Driven mad with grief after her father Polonius was murdered by Hamlet, her lover, she allows herself to die by falling into a stream. The flowers she holds are symbolic: the poppy means death, daisies innocence and pansies love in vain. The painting was regarded in its day as one of the most accurate and elaborate studies of nature ever made. The background was painted from life by the Hogsmill River in Surrey. Elizabeth Siddall posed for Ophelia in a bath of water kept warm by lamps underneath. Gallery label, November 2016 Ophelia's Flowers • Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood Ars Longa Vita Brevis Ophelia’s Flowers When John Everett Millais painted Ophelia he chose to depict her in the moments just before she drowns, a bold choice as most previous artists portrayed Ophelia before she ever enters the water. This isn’t the only striking aspect of his painting, however. In the midst of this picture of death, the plant life is rich and colorful. Each plant, whether in background or foreground, is given equal attention and no detail is spared.

The botanical aspects of Ophelia are so important that Millais chose to paint the background prior to adding in the figure, which was a very unusual move. ‘Ophelia’ (1852) John Everett Millais. Model: Elizabeth Siddal Throughout Hamlet, Ophelia is constantly mistreated and used. Prior to the action of the play, Hamlet and Ophelia are in love. After seeing his father’s ghost, Hamlet decides to distance himself from her as he plots revenge for his father’s murder. When Hamlet kills Ophelia’s father, Polonius, she loses her sanity. Even though she appears quite mad, the flowers she gives to the King, Queen and Laertes have pointed meanings that would have been obvious to Shakespeare’s audience.

Ophelia: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.” Laertes: “A document in madness,–thought and remembrance fitted.” Ophelia: “There’s fennel for you, and columbines:–there’s rue for you; and here’s some for me:–we may call it herb-grace o’Sundays:–O you must wear your rue with a difference.–There’s a daisy:–I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died:–they say he made a good end. ” [Sings] “For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy–“ The scene contains no stage direction, but it is generally accepted that Ophelia hands the flowers out. To her brother Laertes, rosemary and pansies. For remembrance and thought, both of which are probably alluding to their slain father. To King Claudius, fennel and columbines. Fennel for flattery. Columbine may mean ingratitude. Fennel was also believed to cast away evil spirits.

Perhaps Ophelia was suggesting that Claudius was evil. To Queen Gertrude, rue and daisy. Rue for repentance. Is the queen to wear hers with a difference because she shows no repentance for her previous husband’s death? Daisy for faithlessness. See Ophelia’s End: Does She Hand Out the Flowers? In addition to the flowers mentioned in Hamlet, Millais added other flowers with symbolic meaning. Forget-me-nots are visible on the bank. A red poppy floats near Ophelia’s hand, a symbol of sleep and death. Despite her saying that there were no violets, we can see she wears a necklace of them. Fritillary, symbols of sorrow, also appear. In Act 4, Scene 5 we hear Queen Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death. Again, plants play an important role.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream; There with fantastic garlands did she come Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them: There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up: Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element: but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death. And so Ophelia dies, alone with her flowers. Gertrude describes her as ‘mermaid like’ as if in attempt to beautify the ugliness of death. Study of Elizabeth Siddal for the head of ‘Ophelia’.

Millais used Elizabeth Siddal as the model for Ophelia. You can read more about her uncomfortable experience posing for the painting on the Ophelia page of my site LizzieSiddal.com . Millais set up a series of oil lamps under a bathtub in order to keep the water she posed in a comfortable temperature. The lamps did not last, however, and Siddal posed for hours in the cold, never saying a word. This led to illness and the threat of a lawsuit from her father. Siddal later married fellow Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti; she died of a Laudanum overdose two years after their marriage. It is a macabre coincidence that a poppy floats so close to Siddal’s hand in Ophelia. After her death, Rossetti painted Beata Beatrix as a posthumous tribute. A dove delivers a poppy (from which Opium is derived) into her hand. Laudanum is a mixture of opiates and alcohol.

Beata Beatrix, Dante Gabriel Rossetti “… pray you, love, remember…” Pre-Raphaelite art: the paintings that obsessed the Victorians - Telegraph Art Features Pre-Raphaelite art: the paintings that obsessed the Victorians Can a major exhibition and two TV programmes restore Pre-Raphaelite art to its rightful place, asks Franny Moyle . Doomed maid: John Everett Millais' 'Ophelia' By Franny Moyle 5:23PM BST 17 Jun 2009 In 1849, a radical group of artists calling themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, took the British art world by storm. In that same year, John William Waterhouse, the artist who would go on to represent the culmination of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, was born. This month, exactly 160 years on, The Royal Academy in London is mounting the first substantial exhibition of Waterhouse’s work since his death in 1917.

And, in what promises to be a bumper summer for Pre-Raphaelitism, the BBC is showing two new series dedicated to Millais, Hunt and Rossetti. Waterhouse’s work has enormous popular appeal (his painting of The Lady of Shalott has for many years been Tate Britain’s best-selling postcard) and the recent high sales prices achieved (this month, Christie’s sold his sketch for The Magic Circle for £40,850; in April his Miranda fetched $746,500 in New York). But the absence of a major Waterhouse show until now reminds us how, somewhere along the way, Pre-Raphaelite art fell dramatically out of favour with the critical establishment. Set in mythical or literary pasts, populated by doomed lovers and femmes fatales, these sumptuous paintings were dismissed as irrelevant early in the 20th century, when modernism and Dadaism cut art free from representation. One painting on show in the RA serves as a particularly eloquent illustration of the depths to which the artistic reputation of Waterhouse, and the PRB as a whole, once sank.

In 1905, at the height of his fame, Waterhouse painted Lamia, based on the Greek myth of a snakelike woman who would mesmerise men before sucking away their lifeblood. The picture, imbued with a dreamlike atmosphere typical of Pre-Raphaelite art, was immediately snapped up by the reputable collector Sir Alexander Henderson. Just 37 years later, the picture re-emerged for auction at Christie’s – only this time, the painter’s currency had crashed, his subject matter so far out of fashion that it was sold for a paltry 32 guineas as an unattributed painting of “A maiden kneeling before a knight…”. How had things got to this point? It was the largely Franco-centric tastemakers of the early 20th century who stuck the knife in. Though the leading critic of the 19th century, John Ruskin, endorsed Pre-Raphaelitism as “a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years”, his successor, the Bloomsbury-ite Roger Fry, dismissed the PRB as parochial, illustrative failures who dealt in “archaistic bric-à-brac”.

Related Articles Rediscovered Edward Burne-Jones painting reveals artist’s love-triangle angst 09 Sep 2012 For many years since, Fry’s criticisms have stuck: Pre-Raphaelite art still carries a whiff of fustiness. Can this summer’s bonanza finally restore these works to their rightful position among the great – and ground-breaking – British contributions to the history of art? Those who consider shock value to be an important mark of artistic innovation should not forget that, in their day, the PRB caused as great a sensation as the modern painters who succeeded them. They introduced a heightened realism, in which every particularity of the natural world was minutely displayed. They began painting outdoors a decade before the Impressionists and depicted the human form without idealising it. Their work was a departure from the paintings in the grand style that had dominated British art, paintings which, imitative of Raphael, had presented the Victorian public with idealised figures set in whimsical landscapes.

Taking their inspiration from those medieval artists who preceded Raphael, pictures like Millais’ Christ in the House of His Parents, painted in 1850, claimed to return truth to art by imagining Christ not as a cherubic messiah but as a skinny, poor child with dirty toe nails and grubby clothes, living in a meagre carpenter’s shop painted with such democratic attention to detail that even the wood shavings on the floor were given the artist’s full attention. This alternative, non-idealised image of Christ so horrified Charles Dickens that he lambasted Millais in his magazine Household Words, telling him that “wherever it is possible to express the ugliness of feature, limb or attitude, you have expressed it”. Thirty-five years later, Waterhouse reinvented the classical world in a similar kind of imaginative high definition. His St Eulalia (left, middle), pioneering in its archaeological accuracy, depicted with terrible matter-of-factness the half-naked corpse of an adolescent Christian martyr, lying among vermin pigeons in some wintry municipal corner. If we need reminding of the revolutionary aspects of Waterhouse and the Pre-Raphaelites, there are other elements of their work that need no translation for today’s viewer.

Sex, death, obsession, betrayal and human frailty are what these pictures are really about. Take a look, for example, at the peculiar eroticism of Eulalia’s alabaster torso lying in snow. Waterhouse rams this in our face with a strange foreshortening of her body that amplifies its sense of its proximity to us. Once you take this on board, you no longer need worry about the relevance of a classical scene in the 21st century; the death and sex will do just fine. Waterhouse repeatedly plundered myth for stories that would allow him to paint pictures of women, entranced, almost orgasmic, as they move towards either their own demise or that of their male prey. As with Lamia, The Lady of Shalott, floating open-mouthed to her doom, and Ophelia, heading for her watery grave, all got multiple treatments. The great surrealist, Salvador Dali, for whom sex and death were bread and butter, never mistook the profound psychological intensity in Pre-Raphaelite art for sentimentality – as some have. He greatly admired Millais’ Ophelia, from 1852.

Dressed up in Shakespearean reference, it is nevertheless the depiction of a woman committing suicide and an exploration of female sexuality. Ophelia is ecstatic at the moment her life expires. The sexual charge in the picture is heightened by the abundant, competing natural world of the river bank that, portrayed with almost photographic faithfulness, surrounds this woman not only resigned to but aroused by her fate. The depiction of an offering to a greater natural order, Ophelia remains the masterpiece at the heart of Pre-Raphaelitism. Waterhouse, on seeing the picture exhibited in 1886, was inspired to paint his Lady of Shalott. Drawn from Tennyson’s poem, a mythical lady, cursed never to look out of her window, chooses to sacrifice her life for a glimpse of Lancelot and then float to Camelot in a barge to face her doom. In an allegory of sexual longing and capitulation, Waterhouse freezes Tennyson’s story at the moment the lady is about to release the chain that ties her barge. And so he anticipates the abandonment of the rational self to subconscious sexual impulses.

The new Royal Academy Waterhouse exhibition follows in the wake of a popular William Holman Hunt show in Manchester last year and Tate Britain’s blockbuster Millais show the year before. After years in the wilderness, the Pre-Raphaelites are again in the spotlight, and quite rightly. It’s not just for the seductive prettiness of their pictures that these artists should be commended. It’s their enduring insight into the human condition that makes them truly great. 'JW Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite’ is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (0844 209 1919) from June 27. 'The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries’ starts on BBC4 on Tues at 8.30pm. 'Desperate Romantics’, a six-part drama, follows on BBC Two in July. Franny Moyle is author of the book 'Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites’, published by John Murray and out in paperback next month.

Question: Which Pre-Raphaelite artist painted "The Death of Ophelia"?
Answer: JOHN EVERETT MILLAIS